It’s important to know whether you’re dealing with a crackpot or not. But the modern world’s a complicated place, what with Twitter and all! Without a PhD in nuclear physics, how can the average Joe be expected to determine whether some blogger has discovered cold fusion?

Luckily there’s The Crackpot Index, a simple guide to determining if you’re dealing with a crackpot. It follows a simple scoring system. For example:

10 points for mailing your theory to someone you don’t know personally and asking them not to tell anyone else about it, for fear that your ideas will be stolen.

[…]

20 points for each use of the phrase “self-appointed defender of the orthodoxy”.

[…]

40 points for claiming that the “scientific establishment” is engaged in a “conspiracy” to prevent your work from gaining its well-deserved fame, or suchlike.

This is a handy tool! However, as far as I know, no one has taken the obvious next step and written an automated crackpot detector. It would take a writing sample from the potential crackpot, do some pattern matching and sentiment analysis, and pump out a crackpot score.

Unfortunately, such a tool would almost certainly be suppressed by the crackpot establishment.